Soon Mozilla will release Firefox 3.5 and here is a list of the new features:
- Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
- Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
- Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.
“Private Browsing Mode” is something that all modern browsers already has.
The boost on performance is very good, and another reason to stay with Firefox (the other is the add-ons) and not to migrate to Chrome or Safari (don’t even think about Internet Explorer).
It will be interesting to see websites such as YouTube use the HTML 5 <video> tag instead of flash plug-in. YouTube already prepared a page featuring this technology http://www.youtube.com/html5.
It seems that the 3.5 release is not a major breathtaking features but mainly improvements to catch up with the other browsers.
You can download the release candidate version from here.
Mike Beltzner gives a quick preview of what’s new and exciting in Firefox 3.5.
